Development of the Value Management Toolkit

Best practices, value enhancing practices, value management, and value engineering are all terms or “buzzwords” used throughout the engineering and construction industry with much confusion and mystery surrounding them. Project teams, and the companies that sponsor them, are currently overwhelmed by the number, diversity, and complexity of Value Management Processes (VMPs) available to them for implementation. The result is many companies cannot get their Value Management efforts defined, organized or implemented in an effective way.

CII’s Project Team 184 has developed a Value Management Toolkit to address the challenges that organizations face in the awareness, understanding, selection, and implementation of the myriad of VMPs available today. This Toolkit can be helpful at an organization’s program level to assist in developing a strong Value Management program, but it is equally focused on VMP selection and implementation at the project level.

The Value Management Toolkit developed in this research provides an overview of 44 different VMPs, characterizing each VMP with nine descriptive fields of information. These VMPs are all unique, yet optional processes that can contribute significant value to a capital facility project, but are not currently considered across the industry as part of standard project management.

The Toolkit also includes more than two dozen implementation tools in the form of case studies, performance benchmarking data, and how-to procedural guidance. The premier feature of the Toolkit is a computer-based VMP Selection Tool for assisting project teams in selecting which of the 44 VMPs are best suited for their particular project.

The objective of any Value Management program and the implementation of its VMPs is to aid project teams in meeting their clients” expectations, goals and project objectives. Projects may range from design and construction of a new U.S. embassy or federal courthouse that must meet higher security threats, to new pharmaceutical plants rushing to get a new drug to market, to revamping sixty year-old oil refineries to meet tighter environmental regulations, to small-scale projects with short lives. Despite the diverse nature of projects, all project teams must perform to meet their clients” expectations, goals and objectives. The Value Management Toolkit has been designed to offer project teams a unique tool to help meet, if not exceed, those project objectives and clients” expectations.